As World War II dawned in Europe, General George C. Marshall, the new Army Chief of Staff, had to acknowledge that American society - and the citizens who would soon become soldiers - had drastically changed in the previous few decades. Almost every home had a radio, movies could talk, and driving in an automobile to the neighborhood soda fountain was part of everyday life. A product of newly created mass consumerism, the soldier of 1940 had expectations of material comfort, even while at war. Historian James J. Cooke presents the first comprehensive look at how Marshall's efforts to cheer soldiers far from home resulted in the enduring morale services that the Army provides still today. Marshall understood that civilian soldiers provided particular challenges and wanted to improve the subpar morale services that had been provided to Great War doughboys. Frederick Osborn, a civilian intellectual, was called to head the newly formed morale branch, which quickly became the Special Services Division. Hundreds of on-post movie theaters showing first-run movies at reduced prices, service clubs where GIs could relax, and inexpensive cafeterias were constructed. The Army Exchange System took direction under Brigadier General Joseph Byron, offering comfort items at low prices; the PX sold everything from cigarettes and razor blades to low-alcohol beer in very popular beer halls. The great civic organizations - the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, and others - were brought together to form the United Service Organizations (USO). At USO Camp Shows, admired entertainers like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Frances Langford brought home-style entertainment to soldiers within the war zones. As the war heightened in intensity, the Special Service Companies grew to over forty in number, each containing more than one hundred enlisted men. Trained in infantry skills, soldiers in the companies at times would have to stop showing movies, pick up their rifles, and fight. The Special Services Division, PX, and USO were crucial elements in maintaining GI morale, and Cooke's work makes clear the lasting legacy of these efforts to boost the average soldier's spirits almost a century ago. The idea that as American soldiers serve abroad, they should have access to at least some of the comforts of home has become a cultural standard. -- Book jacket.

This book explores the changing food culture of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and maintenance of racial segregation in public eating places. Focusing primarily on the 1900s to the 1960s, Angela Jill Cooley identifies the cultural differences between activists who saw public eating places like urban lunch counters as sites of political participation and believed access to such spaces a right of citizenship, and white supremacists who interpreted desegregation as a challenge to property rights and advocated local control over racial issues. Significant legal changes occurred across this period as the federal government sided at first with the white supremacists but later supported the unprecedented progress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which-among other things-required desegregation of the nation's restaurants. Because the culture of white supremacy that contributed to racial segregation in public accommodations began in the white southern home, Cooley also explores domestic eating practices in nascent southern cities and reveals how the most private of activities-cooking and dining- became a cause for public concern from the meeting rooms of local women's clubs to the halls of the U.S. Congress.

"Johnson examines the worth of liberal democracy and the question of cultural development by looking at novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells. Using the fictions to explore the richness of everyday life, he offers new insight into the relationship between the state and the individual"--Provided by publisher.

"Hogan shares his frontline experience at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest as a National Guardsman in the 165th Infantry's Shamrock Battalion, a regiment in the famed Rainbow Division of World War I. His memories of Chaplain Father Francis Duffy and others present the war from the soldier's perspective"--Provided by publisher.

Dreaming Revolution usefully employs current critical theory to address how the European novel of class revolt was transformed into the American novel of imperial expansion. Bradfield shows that early American romantic fiction - including works by William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe - can and should be considered as part of a genre too often limited to the Nineteenth-century European novel. Beginning with Godwin's Caleb Williams, Bradfield describes the ways in which revolution legitimates itself as a means of establishing Political consensus. For European revolutionaries like Godwin or Rousseau, the tyranny of the king must be replaced by the more indisputable authority of human reason. In other words, democratic revolution makes people free to investigate the same truths and arrive at the same democratic conclusions. In the American novel, however, the Enlightenment's idealized pursuit of abstract truth becomes restructured as a pursuit of abstract space. Instead of revealing knowledge, Americans explore further territories, manifest destiny, limitless regions of the yet-to-be-colonized and the still-to-be-known. In a spirited discussion of works by Brown, Cooper and Poe, Bradfield argues that Americans take the class dynamics of the European psychological novel and apply them to the American landscape, reimagining psychological spaces as geographical ones. Class distinctions become refigured in terms of the common people's pursuit of a meaning vaster than themselves - a meaning which leads them to imagine the always expanding body of colonial America. However, since class conflict is never successfully eliminated or forgotten, the memory of class struggle always reemerges in the narrative like a half-repressed dream of politics. In Dreaming Revolution, Bradfield reveals and interprets these dreams, opening these American novels to a richer and more rewarding reading.